Carlie Simmons (Book 5): One Final Mission (3 page)

Chapter 5

Osaka, Japan, Seven Hours
after the Pandemic Began

Shiro looked down at the blood on his
hands and wished that it was his instead of his younger brother Takumi’s. The
two of them, along with fourteen other survivors, narrowly escaped the carnage
of the streets above the subway. As he squatted in the dank service tunnel one
sub-level below the railway, he could still make out the faint screams of
distant survivors being attacked on the streets above.

Shiro tried to make sense of the horrors
he had witnessed today: the mobs of flesh-hungry cannibals mauling anyone in
their path, the burning cityscape, and the police barricades being overrun by a
tidal wave of fleeing humans. If only he had been able to make it to his
brother’s location sooner, they could’ve made it below ground into the tunnels
that Shiro knew so well from his early years of involvement in Yakuza smuggling
operations.
Just one minute sooner and he wouldn’t have been attacked
—
I
could have saved him! Now the spirits may take all that remains of my family in
this world.

He barely noticed the panting and crying
coming from behind him as the others tried to contain their panic. Shiro lifted
the soiled bandanna from Takumi’s shoulder and inspected the gaping bite-mark
again. The seventeen-year-old’s face was turning slightly yellow and his wet
cough had increased.
What is happening to him? That old lady who bit him on
the street corner must have been infected with something like the others—but
what? I need to get him to a doctor, if any hospitals are still open
. He
looked at Takumi’s face and marveled at how much he had grown up in his
absence. It had been two years and three days since he had last seen him aboard
their uncle’s fishing boat in Osaka Bay. Before Shiro had been put temporarily
in charge of Yakuza operations abroad.

He looked ahead down the dimly lit passage
that snaked to the right. Shiro knew that the Hashimoto Tunnel wound beneath
the city center, eventually emerging near the Yodo River, two miles distant. If
they could make it there, perhaps they could secure a small boat and head
upriver to one of the hospitals further inland. He thought that maybe the rest
of Japan was unaffected and the government would quarantine this prefecture.
They just had to hold out until help arrived. Or maybe the
Kami
, the
spirits of the land, had come to reclaim this world and everyone in it. He
fought back the Shinto beliefs his mother had imparted to him in younger days,
trying to brush them off as relics from the feudal world. Shiro ran his hand
along Takumi’s forehead and felt the searing heat as the young man’s yellowing complexion
seemed to deepen further.

Shiro heard moaning behind him and turned
to see a woman in her mid-thirties holding her pregnant belly. The other
Japanese around her were inching away from her. By her accouterments, she
looked like other American women he had seen in Los Angeles while on Yakuza
business trips.
She better keep quiet and not go into labor right now or
we’re going to have more of those things upon us
.

He felt Takumi’s grip upon his shirt
sleeve and turned to the fever-stricken brown eyes of his brother. “Shiro, I
knew you’d come for me. Mother always said you were the one who would set
things straight in our family. Shiro the faithful.”

Shiro held back a faint smile, squeezing
his brother’s hand. “You always were a terrible liar, Takumi. Mother only saw
you when we were all together
—
and rightfully so; you were untainted by
the demons in our family’s past. Takumi the sure-footed and pure-hearted
—
that’s
why I used to call you
mountain goat
when you were little. Do you
remember?”

Takumi smiled then turned on his side, flinching
in pain as he coughed. The young man reached up and touched Shiro’s hand,
running a finger along a comma-shaped scar on the middle knuckle. “I remember
you being a good man once. Life has asked too much of you, Shiro. One day, I
hope you can be free of this burden that our father put upon you.”

Shiro squeezed the hand back and tried to
remember what it felt like to smile as he forced out a faint grin.

Takumi coughed again, spitting up blood
onto the pavement. “Maybe we can get back home and go out on the boat again and
I can show you what a good fisherman I’ve become.”

“I would like that. Takumi, king of the
ocean. I’m so proud of you, brother.”

The young man’s smiling lips went
straight. Takumi leaned his head down on the cold pavement as the whites of his
eyes slowly clouded into a mustard color. The bulging carotids in his neck grew
flat and his breathing became raspy like a damaged belt sander until it faded
completely; the man’s grip slid off Shiro’s hand.

Shiro knelt down, lightly shaking his
brother’s arm. “No, you must not leave, not now. I’ve finally come for you. We
can live as a family once more.” His voice began cracking and he forced his
tears back. He arched his back and balled both of his fists. Though he cared
little about what the others behind him would think, it was culturally
ingrained to cloak one’s emotions and he felt the iron fist of a thousand years
of tradition grinding on the walls of his soul. He tried to contain the
grenade-like anguish building up inside him as he stared into Takumi’s silent
face.

Shiro passed his fingers along Takumi’s
eyelids, closing them. He leaned over the body in a deep bow that turned into an
embrace lasting several minutes. Then he stood, forcing his rubbery legs to
extend as he staggered beyond a wrought-iron gate along the damp tunnel, his
fist pounding on the wall with each sluggish step. Thirty feet ahead he stopped
at the confluence of another passage and peered into the inky interior. A
single tear rolled down his cheek and his ribs shuddered as he let out a muffled
breath.
This world has left me nothing—no brother, no family, no dignity.
Everything is gone. Now perhaps the spirits will come for me so I no longer
have to live in this hellish land.

He slid his hand down to the tanto knife
in his belt and removed the soiled blade from its wooden scabbard. Shiro
straightened up and stared into the dark expanse of the tunnel before him as he
clenched both hands around the handle of the blade and aimed the tip at his
lower abdomen. He had fought his entire adult life to purge himself of his
Shinto upbringing but always found himself drawn back to it, if only for the
comfort it provided to balance out the violence of his occupation. The veneer
of his psyche was peeling back and he found the animistic nature of his
religious beliefs pushing to the forefront. “If you will not allow me to atone
for my sins in this world, then I will force you to meet me head on in the
next,” he growled into the dark. As his stomach tightened and his grip
crystallized, he heard a faint voice behind him. His eyes darted along the
ceiling, wondering if it was the spirit world taunting him, then he heard it
again, followed by faint footsteps shuffling along the damp concrete. He
lowered his blade and turned at the ghostlike apparition coming into view in
the dim light.

“Please help me?” the blond-haired woman
said, clutching her protruding belly. “My baby is coming
—
please, I need
help.”

Shiro’s eyebrow’s scrunched together in
irritation, wondering why this
geijin
was intruding upon his plans. He
needed to leave this purgatory and had already paid his toll. “The others can
help you. Go back. I am…I am of no use to anyone.”

The woman kept moving forward, her stride
shortening as she forced out each breath. Shiro deftly slid the blade back into
its sheath as she collapsed into his arms. “You saved us on the streets above.
I need your help
—
please,” she said as her breathing intensified.

He could still see the slumped figure of
his brother in the distance. He just wanted to run into the darkness to finish
what he had started
—
to free his soul from the tomb that his life had
become. How much more was he going to be tormented before his sentence was served
in full? The pale woman squeezed his forearm with a climber’s grip, pleading
with her eyes.

Shiro removed his leather jacket,
revealing his heavily tattooed arms. He laid it on the ground then placed her
gently down on it. He removed the sheathed blade from his beltline and held it
firmly for a second, letting out an exhale, then setting it beside him.

He whispered in a commanding tone to the
others that he needed them to come up and to lock the service gate in the
tunnel behind them. As they quietly closed the rusty gate, sealing off Takumi,
before scurrying along the dark passage, Shiro knelt down beside the woman, his
taut facial muscles slightly loosening.

“I’m Nora
—
what’s your name?” she
muttered in between frantic breaths.

He sighed, gritting his teeth as he looked
straight ahead into the dark tunnel ahead of him, his mind swimming in another
reality. “So it appears this world is not through with me yet.”

“What?” she said with a puzzled
expression.

He reluctantly pulled his gaze away from
the abyss and looked down at her while he nodded his head. “Shiro,” he said
with a pause. “My name is Shiro Hatsumi.”

Chapter 6

The evening before departure, Shane told
everyone on his handpicked team to assemble at 1830 in the small briefing room
outside the armory. He and Matias were silently doing an inventory of their
weapons, magazines, rocket launchers, suppressors, and ammo crates. Jared
walked in, tossing his weathered tan pack on the metal table.

“You called and I came
—
now the rest
of the free world is once again safe,” Jared said with a grin as he walked over
to the Glock 19s laid out in a row. “What, no, ninja swords
—
we’re going
to Japan and we don’t have swords?”

“I’ll see what I can do for you when we
arrive, Bruce Lee,” said Matias.

“Uhm, Bruce Lee was Chinese
—
you
probably meant to say Sonny Chiba or Toshiro Mifune. Now those guys were
bad-ass Japanese warriors. Nobody did it like Mifune, you know, like in that
samurai flick.”

“Which one, you mean
Sanjuro
?” said
Shane. “Quite a movie
—
which one of those guys would you have been,
Jared?”

“Uhm, you know, the, uhm, dude who took
down the bad guys at the end.”

Shane just frowned. “You never even saw
the film, did you, you bullshit artist. I can always tell when you’re lying
because you’ve got this little tell you do with your right hand, tucking the
thumb into your beltline like that.”

Jared looked down and hastily removed his
hand from his waist, folding his arms across his chest. “How come you know so
much about it?”

“Whenever I was deployed and we had long
bouts of time on transport ships, one of the guys who was a Kurosawa film buff
would always pop in a samurai DVD. I’ve seen ’em all.”

Jared smirked and shook his head towards Matias,
who was holding back a smile. “Of course you did. Why am I not surprised? But I
can almost bet you’ve never seen Sonny Chiba in
Sister Streetfighter
,
have you?

“Sonny who?” Shane said, patting him on
the shoulders as he walked towards the doorway and motioned for Pavel, who was walking
down the steps to join them.

“You’re right on time. Come on in and let
the pain begin,” said Shane as he started to roll up his shirt sleeve.

Pavel rested his black medical bag on the
table and opened it up, removing a clear plastic cylinder lined with syringes. The
rest of the group trickled in behind him: Eliza, Carlie, Amy, and the two
pilots, Hadley and Comstock. Carlie dropped her pack in the corner and stood
with her hands on her hips at the other end of the table opposite Shane. Pavel moved
up towards Shane and removed the plastic cap from the needle, sticking him in
the left deltoid above his tattoo of a sea serpent.

“This will take effect immediately but
full coverage will not occur for another twelve hours so make sure to avoid any
encounters with the undead on that plane ride, OK,” the older man said in his
slight Russian accent while patting Shane on the other arm.

Carlie moved up next and stood in place
beside Pavel. “So do all the operators get these or are we the only lucky
ones?”

“Oh, you are lucky alright, my young
duchovna, but, yes, all of Duncan’s special operations units get inoculated
along with medical staff and frontline personnel. After that, we will be busy
for the next three months making another batch of this,” he said, injecting her
in the etched muscles of her shoulder. “Or until you get back home here with
the device on my shopping list. In the meantime, this vaccine will provide
immunity against blood-borne pathogens spread through the bite of the undead.
As for those who have already turned, their fate is, regrettably, sealed.”

Before he moved over to the next person,
Pavel reached down and held Carlie’s hand, squeezing it firmly while whispering
to her in Russian, “If I had had a daughter, I would have wished she was like
you. You are what is best in a leader
—
in a woman.”

Carlie could see the paternal warmth in
his eyes but also trepidation that they might not see each other again if this
mission failed. She smiled while returning the grip on his hand, holding back
her emotions at his compliment and knowing that he was saying farewell with a
concern she dared not fathom. “And a greater comrade I never knew. You’re a
good man, Pavel, and you have given us hope again
—
given me hope that we
will fix this broken world.”

The admiration and fondness Pavel and
Carlie felt for one another filled the space between them. Then the older man
nodded before pulling away and resuming his work.

***

After they had completed their packing and
weapons inspection, Shane informed them that they each had one hour left to
take care of any last-minute business or goodbyes. Carlie took this time to
walk up to the roof of A-Wing where she often went to seek solace before and
after missions. The silent space away from others allowed her to clear her head
and the fragrant saltwater breeze let her mind drift to happier days of her
youth when she was with her brothers and father along the east coast. The sky
was relatively clear and she stared up at the moon. Carlie closed her eyes and
inhaled deeply, trying to purge the recurring images of Osaka that were still
fresh in her thoughts.

While she was often brimming with
anticipation before a mission, the one they were about to embark on filled her
with dread. They had avoided most of the large cities all these months for a
reason but when they did go in they had a reasonable sense of what they were
facing and knew the escape routes out. Japan had been a silent abyss since the
early days of the pandemic. She and the others found it discomforting that
there had been very few radio transmissions emanating from that country,
meaning that it must have been devastated more than other regions of the globe
or had completely succumbed. Even obscure places like Belarus and Uruguay had
survivors that relayed messages on occasional ham radio broadcasts
—
but
not Japan.

Carlie was usually the first one in line
to board the plane when departing for a mission but this time she cringed at
leaving. Now, they had to cast their fate into the wind with no hope of a
rescue team to fly in and retrieve them if things went south. As the low
cumulus clouds above were dyed plum-orange in the dawn light, Carlie looked out
at the grounds of the base below, thinking it could be the last time she set
her eyes upon the place she called home.